Roadblock Removal: Designing for Tomorrow’s 4G in Today’s 3G Designs

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In this episode of First Things First, I sit down with Ken Bednasz from Telit to talk about one telematics company’s challenges when transitioning from 3G to 4G. Ken shares his experience working with this customer and describes the ways that Telit helped them overcome these roadblocks.

The Story:
A Telematics Company Needs to Transition from 3G to 4G

Ken brings us a story about one of Telit’s customers that works in the telematics and tracking industry. As the marketplace transitions from 2G and 3G to 4G LTE, this company has to make some important decisions about their IoT solution, keeping hardware and software needs in mind.

The Lesson:
For Best Results, Plan Ahead for Rapid Changes in Technology

You can learn a lot from the challenges that this telematics company faced during the transition from 3G to 4G:

Technology changes rapidly, and you’ve got to plan accordingly if you want to come out on top.

Look ahead to anticipate changes in technology and shifts in the industry so that you can design solutions with your future needs in mind.

Work with partners that have experience designing successful IoT implementations that keep these rapid technology changes in mind.

About Our Guest: Ken Bednasz

Ken Bednasz is the Vice President of Applications Engineering at Telit. Ken has 25 years of experience in the wireless cellular and has spent 15 years working in the IoT space. For the past 12 years, Ken has been working with IoT integrator partners to help them bring their IoT solutions to the marketplace.

Show Notes

0:24 – Chris starts the show off by introducing today’s guest, Ken Bednasz, VP of Applications Engineering at Telit.

2:43 – Ken explains what a cellular module is and what role it plays in IoT solutions.

6:16 – Chris sets the stage for today’s IoT implementation story about a North American company that works in the telematics and tracking industry.

7:21 – Ken discusses the challenges that companies with IoT solutions faced with the roll out of 4G.

13:29 – Ken explains how Telit worked with others in the industry to advocate for the Telematics company and overcome the challenges they were facing.

16:13 – Chris and Ken talk more about why sharing a module form factor across different technologies helps with technology migration.

18:35 – Ken also discusses some of the software challenges that arise from moving to an all IP-based technology.

22:40 – Ken talks about how lightweight M2M protocol could affect an organization in the telematics industry.

24:53 – Chris and Ken wrap up the podcast with the biggest takeaways from this story of IoT implementation.

Quotables

“At Telit, we are focused on making these technology transitions as seamless as possible. We bring products to market that have the same form factor, same pin out, same commands. And in drivers, we make it very easy for our partners to move to different technologies to allow them to go to 2G, 3G, 4G LTE and move to different regions around the world.”

“This partner in particular had a specific form factor that it needed to keep, and there was no way to keep them form factor and add a secondary antenna, so we had to figure out a way with the mobile network operators to overcome this.”

“Typically, when you’re going to design around a module, there’s a pretty heavy investment. You have to do hardware design and optimize software usage over the cellular networks… What we do at Telit is allow you to make that investment one time. Then after that you can heavily reuse everything you’ve done to scale your business to different mobile network operators, different frequency bands, different regions of the world.”

“One of the initiatives that I have within my team is to make sure that every partner we talk to, every customer we touch, is designing FOTA capabilities into their device because we would be doing them a disservice if we didn’t educate them on what is happening in the industry – and that’s rapid technology evolution.”

Additional Resources

About Our Sponsor

First Things First is sponsored by Telit, a global provider of wireless connectivity modules, platforms, IoT operator services and professional services. Telit supports thousands of direct and indirect customers by enabling hundreds of millions of connected ‘things.’ With almost two decades of IoT innovation experience, Telit delivers secure, integrated end-to-end IoT solutions for many of the world’s largest brands, including enterprises, OEMs, system integrators, and service providers across industries.